Ashcroft Faces Quandary Over Clinton Scandal Secrets

Sometime in the next three months Attorney General John Ashcroft is expected to decide whether to make public still-secret evidence in an array of Clinton-Gore scandals, including Whitewater, Filegate, Chinagate and the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio.

The evidence comes in the form of nearly 2 million recovered e-mails that Justice Department lawyers will review with attorneys for the former president and vice president.

In a Jan. 9 filing with U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, the Bush Justice Department revealed that Corbett Technologies of Alexandria, Va., had completed the process known as the "Tape Restoration Project."

"From 189 failed [e-mail] tapes, 53,149 unique e-mails were restored and added to the TRP. In total, the number of unique TRP e-mails is 1,844,242," the DOJ said.

"White House whistle-blowers who have talked to people who have seen this e-mail believe it contains incriminating evidence," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told NewsMax.com Monday.

The e-mails cover critical periods in the late 1990s and were under subpoena by Congress and the independent counsel. Sources familiar with their contents have described them as potentially very damaging.

Judicial Watch first revealed the White House e-mail scandal in 1999, when then-Clinton administration computer expert Sheryl Hall told the legal watchdog group that critical e-mail evidence was being withheld.

After Hall's revelation, another White House computer expert testified he was told to keep quiet or there would be "a jail cell with your name on it."

The restored electronic files also cover illicit Commerce Department trade missions in which tickets allegedly were sold to corporate donors to the Democratic National Committee, and may even contain evidence on Enrongate.

One odd coincidence: Attorney Earl Silbert, who now represents Enron CEO Ken Lay, also represented Clinton Chinagate kingpin James Riady as well as Northrop-Grumman, one of the independent contractors hired by the Clinton White House to help with e-mail retrieval.

"Now the question is will the Department of Justice under Ashcroft divulge what they find?" Fitton said.

A recent Bush executive order shielding materials of past administrations from discovery could be invoked in this case, he warned.

Just Who Is Charles F. C. Ruff ? ~ please post what you know about Clinton's 5th White House Counsel

The White House Plays Ruff ~ Just Who Is Charles F. C. Ruff ?

BUMP !

.........In the past, however, Ruff was more talkative. In 1977, as he was closing the office, Ruff spoke at length to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Among the many topics discussed was Ruff's fear that Congress would re-open the Watergate inquiry at some point in the future. Should that happen, Ruff continued, investigators might question the actions of the original Watergate prosecutors--including Ruff. How would he respond? As Woodward listened, Ruff outlined a strategy that would prove enormously useful to the Clinton White House two decades later:

"I'd say, 'Gee, I just don't remember what happened back then,' and they won't be able to indict me for perjury and that, maybe that's the principal thing that I've learned in four years....I just intend to rely on that failure of memory." ............Clinton's 5th White House Counsel Charles F. C. Ruff

Did someone say the name "Chuck" Ruff ?

Just before Clinton 'took the 5th' White House Counsel, Charles 'Watergate & Tobacco' Ruff was Teamster Boss Ron Carey's "secret counsel"

If Ruff is involved ~ That says it all.

According to the New York Times, White House counsel Beth Nolan's statement that reveals her predecessor, Charles Ruff, has been aware of the computer problem for years.

"As Mr. Ruff understood the technical problem at the time, he did not think that the error had an effect on previous searches or that it might affect future searches of e-mail records," states Nolan, "As a result, Ruff had no reason to believe there was any need to notify investigative bodies of this error."

The White House Plays Ruff June 1997

Dick Morris Says Clinton's Lawyer, Ch arles Ruff, Is a Liar

Clinton Defense ~ Charles F. C. Ruff

Ruff lied to the Hoekstra Committee about 'passing through' over $300K to Jack Pallidino Then they played a shell game with his work product

TIME ~ 12.21.98 State Of The Union Hoffa Takes Charge. First Target: Democrats By ED BARNES/NEW YORK:

...........As part of their case, Hoffa's lawyers plan to detail the "work product" of CHARLES RUFF, now White House counsel, who briefly worked for the Teamsters under Carey. In 1993 Ruff allegedly paid Jack Palladino, a San Francisco private detective, more than $150,000 out of Teamsters funds for unspecified services. A House subcommittee that had tried to investigate the payment was stymied by legal objections from Ruff and Carey. There have been allegations that the money was for work Palladino did for Clinton in his 1992 campaign to keep stories of sexual misconduct from becoming public, or that the money was used to suppress Teamster dissidents. Ruff has denied the allegations as "false and nonsensical." (Calls to McAuliffe's attorney were not returned.) The proposed lawsuit will contend that government monitors failed to do their job overseeing the Carey administration and, "as a result," says a source close to the suit, "more than $20 million of taxpayer money was wasted on one election and the union went bankrupt." If Hoffa is successful, the Teamsters may be in for a windfall. Under racketeering statutes, successful plaintiffs can recover as much as triple the damages...

From last Summer's edition of the RNC's magazine RISING TIDE here is:

Laboring Against America
by Michael Moroney:

Sen. John McClellan called it "crime without punishment." Thirty years later, Reagan's Organized Crime Commission wanted Justice to use civil racketeering laws to clean up the national Teamsters unions. George Bush's Justice Department launched the case. But the Clinton administration sees anti-labor rackets laws as a political profit center, much like selling the nation's nuclear secrets.

In 1978 wannabe Stephen Brill, Clinton's ultimate supporter, wrote a book that painted Teamster Ron Carey as a family man with an extremely modest income. Brill did not mention that Carey 's Queens local union was controlled by the mob. Boosted by Brill and a far-left reputed rank-and-file reform group, Carey emerged in 1992 as a national Teamsters reform leader.

By 1993, Carey 's secret life had caught up with him. Stories in The New York Times, TIME magazine and Business Week began to unravel Carey's facade of reform. He tried to end court supervision over the union; appointed a mob associate to run a corrupt airfreight local in New York; the former boss of New York 's Lucchese crime family identified him as a mob figure; and in early 1994 a treasure trove of real estate Carey owned with his close friend and female business partner in the Florida Keys was revealed. With the press hounds on his heels, Carey arranged to meet union lawyer Harold Ickes, then Bill Clinton's New York campaign manager. Millions of Teamsters PAC money and support started flowing to Clinton. Carey 's new allies on the left and the Clinton Justice Department soon rallied to his defense. Expecting to get away with it, Carey 's minions then embezzled approximately $885,000 of union funds to get him re-elected, and as Carey was about to fall on corruption charges, he pulled off the famous UPS strike-the ultimate Wag the Dog trick.

Now that he has been expelled from the union, and several of his campaign aides pled guilty, Carey 's friends in the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who escaped accountability continue to funnel union money to the Democratic Party.

Recently obtained documents shed more light on the steps taken by the Carey regime to protect their ersatz champion and to deflect scrutiny while the AFL-CIO pumped money into the Democratic Party.

Carey 's left-wing staff and supporters defined every revelation about his past as an activity of James P. Hoffa, and particularly two characters in Hoffa 's sphere who had previously been associated with Lyndon La Rouche. This was their "vast right -wing conspiracy" ploy.

Teamsters' lawyer Judy Scott brought in Scott Armstrong as an investigative consultant. Armstrong spoke to far-left lawyer Michael Tigar and Anthony Podesta (brother of now White House Chief of Staff John Podesta), who then went to Charles Ruff. Ruff shielded Carey from government investigators. He presented documents to favorably explain Carey 's finances - although Ruff's own associates observed that there were "glaring soft spots" and that it was unlikely that the explanations, insufficient for Business Week, would survive government scrutiny. (Documents show that both Carey and his girl friend would not disclose records from their joint bank accounts and that they "relied heavily on undocumented representations.") Nevertheless, Ruff's spin worked with politically malleable investigators.

In the "it's a small world category", it's interesting to note that, using union funds, Ruff hired Clinton Arkansas "bimbo eruptions" investigator Jack Palladino to investigate internal union corruption in Chicago. Carey's people also investigated Hoffa and his supporters, including monitoring their garbage and gathering evidence on ex-wives and children.

Millions of Teamsters' dollars were spent to protect Carey. Close to a million dollars of Teamsters' funds were embezzled to get him re-elected before the truth finished him. Ruff became White House counsel and Ickes now runs Hillary Clinton's New York Senate campaign. And millions from the labor movement still flow into the Democratic Party.

This is what Sen. McClellan meant by crime without punishment.

As a former labor rackets investigator with the departments of Justice and Labor, Michael Moroney is credited with exposing Ron Carey 's organized crime association and corrupt background. From 1992 through 1994, Moroney served as a court appointed deputy trustee of the Teamsters' airfreight local at New York's Kennedy and Newark airports.

Clinton impeachment counsel Ruff dies at 61 - TWT ~ Jerry Seper

Has Ruff Been Cremated Yet?

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